Feb/100
Matchlock
A symptom of the illness..
Williamsburg, VA, has a serious problem. A dire problem. A pancake house problem.
Seriously, this town has way too many pancake houses. You see a pancake house, you’re like, “Aw, cool. That’s fun.” Pancake houses seem vaguely Nordic to me, like something you’d encounter nestled in a cove in the Alps on your trek through Europe, and so when I saw two pancake houses I was like, “Wow! Jackpot! Which one do we hit up first?” But by the time I counted eleven pancake houses within three miles of each other, I realized that I had entered another world. A syrupy world. A world that doesn’t know when to stop building pancake houses.
Jess and I celebrated our ninth Valentine’s Day together. This is, of course, ridiculous, seeing as it’s hard for me to believe that I’ve even been alive that long let alone in a relationship for that long, but here we are. Jess has always been naturally gifted with this “holiday,” even though we both regard it warily, like mice in the garden watching the prowling house cat, as a painfully commercial day full of artificial pressures to spend money. This conviction hasn’t yet translated into not celebrating it – like many Americans we are vaguely against it and still participate – but we’ve gotten to the point where price-hiked roses, store-bought chocolates, and teddy bears made in China (all three of which I got Jess for our second Valentine’s Day – I’m a winner) just don’t really mean much anymore. I take this as a good sign.
Feb/100
Billy Mayerl Rocks
Had to share this epic video, courtesy of Scott N. Here is one of my heroes, Billy Mayerl, making all other pianists look like hacks and liars.
BILLY MAYERL AND HIS CLAVIERS
Fun fact: Flying across those keys on the right is a very young Marian McPartland, the famous host of Piano Jazz on NPR!
I play a number of Billy’s pieces, but no one alive can play them as well as he did. That said, I really, really want to try that play-two-pianos-at-a-time trick now 
Feb/103
The Seagull Shuffle
Seagulls are really bad dancers.
I’ve been working on a couple new tunes lately. I had a relative dry spell there for *cough* six years *cough* but am happily back to writing music on a pretty regular basis. And, unlike when I was a teenager, I’m actually writing things down this time.
Part of this latest effort has involved going back to tunes that I wrote when I was a teenager and sprucing them up, updating them with new harmonies and ideas. It’s not like anyone has heard those old pieces, and I’d rather turn them into something I perform than just have them sitting in the past forgotten. Besides, I can do a lot of things at the piano that I couldn’t do then, which helps.
Oh, and I have some idea of how music works now. That helps too.
And so, with that said, here’s my latest tune. I’ve been writing a bunch of meaningful pieces – Theresa Novelette, Marty’s Blues – and I thought it was time I went back to my roots and wrote a piece of beer drinkin’, cigar smokin’ ragtime.
Oh, and it needed to be named after a bird. Don’t ask questions.
I give you “The Seagull Shuffle”:
Feb/100
The Boxing Reindeer is Dead
The head is the best part.
From my step-nephew:
The boxing reindeer is dead. He got crushed in Tyler’s book bag. But, you get one of his body parts in memory of him. Please, be safe.
Best wishes,
Tyler
I cannot be the only person who recognizes the genius of my nine-year-old step-nephew.
Literally, he may be one of the funniest, quirkiest people on the planet. I aspire to this.
Feb/100
The Great Pipe Nothing
24 inches of snow fell in 12 hours! Ah!
The entire reason I came to Pittsburgh this weekend was to perform in a theater organ concert with Bryan Wright and the Boilermaker Jazz Band. That was before anyone knew Pittsburgh was about to get 24 inches of snow.
Needless to say, my concert got canceled faster than a Joss Whedon series on FOX.
I was really looking forward to it, too. I was nervous – I’m not a theater organist and was about to pretend to be in front of hundreds of people – but I was also excited, the same kind of excited I get every time a new “Star Wars” project is announced: blind hope that it’s going to be awesome, and stark terror that it’s going to be terrible.
But after the sting of that passed, and the calls were made to family and friends that we wouldn’t be getting together after all, and after a day spent shoveling hundreds of pounds of snow out of Mom’s driveway, not to mention rescuing a few stranded motorists unlucky enough not to have new tires on their car (and who were, I assure you, surprised to see someone with Virginia license plates so deft with a shovel), I was shocked to find myself so energized at 11 PM that I had to go for a walk in the snow-blanketed neighborhood to get myself anywhere near ready to sleep.
Jan/100
(Lack of) Organization
I think I’m in need of an intervention. I went through all of my CDs this weekend. Not a single disc matched the case that it was in.
If Bryan were a character in a video game, he would be called "The Archivist"
Josh Groban was in Jo Ann Castle. The Chieftains lived with Dave Matthews. Scott Joplin lay with John Williams. Bon Jovi was stuffed inside Michael Jackson. Honest to God it looked like someone had deliberately gone through my stuff and messed it up to screw with me but, no, this is my natural state. When it comes to organization I am, as the French say, a hot mess.
They say opposites attract, which is why I’m friends with Bryan Wright. His CD collection is alphabetized, prioritized, cataloged, categorized, displayed, diagrammed, digitized, duplicated, researched, registered on the list of Historic Landmarks, and indexed by Google. He can find any CD, record, recording, research paper, picture, piano roll, or page of information in a manner of seconds and tell you exactly what it is, where he got it, why he owns it, how much it’s worth, who collects it, and which needle to use on his record player to play it. He’s like RoboCop with a spreadsheet. He might as well have x-ray vision, because being that organized seems like a superpower to me.
Jan/100
Martin and Luke’s Excellent Adventures
This about sums up our process...
One of my oldest and best friends, Luke, has begun chronicling a decade of our hilarious misadventures in Star Wars fan film-making over at his blog, the “Book of Luke.” You should check it out hither.
There are so many stories about our fan film days that, seriously, I could do one each day here for the next year and not run out.
Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Luke’s post:
Martin was in his Neo Maximus outfit. It was a dark grey trench coat with the sleeves and a majority of the lower half cut off. 7-inch-long vertical slits were cut 3 inches apart into what remained of the coat below the waist, creating the appearance of the garment that Maximus wore in the arena in Gladiator. If memory serves me correctly, there were washers dangling from the bottom of every strip, too.
No, he’s not exaggerating.
I realize that I may not have mentioned to anyone that I am a huge Star Wars nerd. If there is any doubt, I invite you to check out the website for my 40-minute Star Wars epic, “Hunt for the Holocron.” Warning: Following this link will filleth your Dorkimus Maximus cups for at least a week.
Jan/101
“Get that ragtime out of my house!”
Here is one of my favorite things ever.
In 1970, Max Morath (of Martin’s-Day-Making fame) interviewed Eubie Blake, one of the most talented and enduring musicians of the 20th century. Eubie wrote a gaggle of ridiculously famous tunes including “I’m Just Wild About Harry” and “Memories of You.” He scored the first all-black Broadway musical “Shuffle Along.” I’m pretty sure he invented raindrops on roses, bright copper kettles, and warm woolen mittens.
Eubie Blake: Musician. Lover. Stamp.
You’ve never heard of him? They put him on a frigging stamp, people, right next to Louis Armstrong. Wake up.
I perform a number of Eubie’s tunes, including Baltimore Todolo and Charleston Rag, and consider his music to be one of the major pillars of my life (along with whining, wood-fired pizza, and whining about wood-fired pizza). Which is why it is so awesome to hear him telling the story of how he got started playing ragtime:
This interview, which I yoinked from the US Survey Course on the Web at GMU (link), captures everything I love about ragtime: its playfulness, its subversiveness, its low lows and high highs. I smile the whole time that I listen to Eubie talk. His voice inspires me. My favorite part is when he says, “[Ragtime] was out of the houses of ill repute, or bordellos, I guess that’s a better word, and it was low, low, low. It was considered low music, see. It wasn’t, it wasn’t art, see.” Squee.
Jan/101
John “Fingers” Williams
My handwriting is not neat enough to compose like this
I started writing ragtime when I was 13. My first piece of music was called the “Starlight March,” and no you cannot hear it. All the Internet needs to know about Martin Spitznagel the composer is that he was an amazing supergenius who never wrote a bad tune ever. Why don’t you preserve that, Wayback Machine.
Since that fateful afternoon at Mom’s house on the Baldwin spinet 14 years ago, plunking my way through “Starlight,” I’ve written mainly for the piano. Okay, only for the piano (with some tiny exceptions). This past December, however, I had the opportunity to do a full-on orchestral score for my company’s holiday card, which you can watch/listen to/mock incessantly here.
Now, I didn’t have a live orchestra to work with, so I used a combination of virtual instruments, Logic Pro 7, and a 49-key midi keyboard pulled from the action-less depths of Piano Hell in order to score the card. Not that I would have known what to do with a real orchestra, seeing as I only know how to play the piano – it’d be like asking a person with a driver’s license to fly a fleet of airplanes, i.e., I sort of get what they do and I know what not flying looks like, but I’m not sure you’d want me running the show – but despite all that, and the ridiculously compressed schedule I had to work with, I’m really pleased with the way it turned out.
Welcome
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Any questions, please e-mail me at martin@spitzfire.com.